Saturday, February 23, 2013

The madness gripping the media

(First published in The Dominion Post, February 22.)

IT’S HARD to remember a new television programme that has
been more relentlessly savaged than TV One’s Seven Sharp, but people should give it credit for achieving
something no other programme has accomplished: it’s so bad it has forced the
massive bloc of habitual, dyed-in-the-wool One viewers to change channels at 7
o’clock. This is a seismic shift.

I watched the very first Seven
Sharp and was aghast. If that was the best they could do with weeks to
prepare, and with an expectant audience primed by a promotional blitzkrieg, then
the outlook was surely dire.

But it seemed only fair to give the programme time to settle
down, so I left it for a couple of weeks and then tuned in again. And what was
the first thing I saw? Several minutes of trite, self-indulgent banter between
the three gibbering hosts and youthful New York correspondent Jack Tame, TVNZ’s
boy wonder, who had purportedly been named in a Valentine’s Day survey – about
which I would be deeply sceptical – as New Zealand’s sexiest male media
personality.

Only people employed in the self-absorbed world of
television could assume anyone else shared their delighted fascination with
this morsel of non-information.

I can only conclude everyone associated with this show has a
death wish. Seven Sharp is so
lightweight it threatens to float away.

Its attempt to woo a young audience, as evidenced by the
quirky graphics and links with online social media, is symptomatic of a strange
madness gripping the entire media industry.

Everyone in the media and the associated advertising
business is obsessed with the cult of youth. It doesn’t seem to matter that
TV One’s traditional, core audience consists of older viewers, or that the youth
market actually isn’t all that interested in watching free-to-air television at
7pm.

The state-owned TV network (and please remind me why the
taxpayers still own an organisation that has long since abandoned any sense of
public obligation) seems determined to drive off its loyal, long-term viewers
in the hope of securing a younger, “cooler” audience.

It’s well on the way to achieving the first of those
objectives, but the second may not be so easy.

* * *

ONE intriguing aspect of the Novopay fiasco is that the
government has gifted the teachers’ unions with a significant propaganda
victory.

For years governments have fought the PPTA and NZEI for
control of the education sector. It’s a battle that shouldn’t be necessary, of
course, because we elect governments, not unions, to decide education policy;
but a combination of weak politicians and arrogant unions meant the teachers
often had the upper hand, defying and even sabotaging attempts at reform for
reasons that usually had more to do with self-interest than with the quality of
education.

Since 2008, however, there have been signs that the balance
of power in education is shifting back where it belongs. Under a less
teacher-friendly government, the unions have struggled harder to get traction.

Then along came Novopay, and suddenly public sympathy swung
back the teachers’ way.

Whatever else might be said about teachers, they are entitled to be paid. Yet far from throwing tantrums over the disruption and inconvenience
of recent weeks, they have behaved with admirable restraint – and no doubt
earned brownie points from the public along the way. Unions have gone on strike
with far less provocation.

No government could defend the chaos over teachers’ pay,
still less the incompetence of the company to which the
payroll contract was awarded, apparently in the face of pointed warnings about Novopay’s
shortcomings.

The upshot is that the National-led government has
surrendered the moral high ground to the teachers just when it seemed on the
verge of subduing them. Nice work, chaps.

* * *

IT’S A PHRASE you see all the time in advertisements and
newspaper articles, but there are few words in the English language more
meaningless than “award-winning”.

Whether it’s an award-winning house, restaurant, book, wine
or film, all the phrase tells you is that someone has at some stage decided it
was the best of a bunch.

But often we don’t know who that “someone” was and who the
other contenders were (or how many). So we lack the vital context in which to
make an informed judgment about the award’s merit. An extreme example would be
an award given to the best kosher restaurant in Woodville.

Anyway, all such decisions are ultimately subjective. And
who knows what personal prejudices the judge or judges may have brought to
bear?

I have been a judge in various awards myself and know how
flawed the judging process can be, even when the organisers go to great lengths
to make it as fair and objective as possible. Suffice it to say that, to
paraphrase Groucho Marx, I wouldn’t want to win any competition in which I had
been a judge.

1 comment:

Re Seven Sharp. I would have thought the one audience guaranteed to grow was the mature/old who are the products of larger families and increased life expectancy and the yoof market only soso given the fall in female fertility.

If anything I would have thought the youth market at 7pm would more likely be pre teens and parents looking for something more along the lines of Robin Hood.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.